Rethinking Darkness

Cultures, Histories, Practices

Nick Dunn, Tim Edensor, Nick Dunn, Tim Edensor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367201159
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429535307
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the concept of darkness through a range of cultures, histories, practices and experiences. It engages with darkness beyond its binary positioning against light to advance a critical understanding of the ways in which darkness can be experienced, practised and conceptualised.

Humans have fundamental relationships with light and dark that shape their regular social patterns and rhythms, enabling them to make sense of the world. This book 'throws light' on the neglect of these social patterns to emphasize how the diverse values, meanings and influences of darkness have been rarely considered. It also examines the history of our relationship with the dark and highlights how normative attitudes towards it have emerged, while also emphasising its cultural complexity by considering a contemporary range of alternative experiences and practices. Challenging notions of darkness as negative, as the antithesis of illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of darkness to stimulate our senses and deepen our understandings of different spaces, cultural experiences and creative engagements.

Offering a rich exploration of an emergent field of study across the social sciences and humanities, this book will be useful for academics and students of cultural and media studies, design, geography, history, sociology and theatre who seek to investigate the creative, cultural and social dimensions of darkness.

1 Introduction

Venturing into the dark: gloomy multiplicities

Tim Edensor and Nick Dunn

Darkness is multiple, situational, contested. In this introductory chapter, we seek to underpin these contentions by foregrounding the sheer diversity of values, ideals, sensory experiences, cultural practices and creative engagements that have been entangled with darkness across space and time. Our account thus endeavours to provide a compendious review of the rich writings on darkness that have been disseminated across the humanities and social sciences and have surged in recent years. We align ourselves with the contemporary academic, creative, ecologically inspired and aesthetic reappraisals of darkness that are challenging the long-standing negative associations that have prevailed until recently. We have sought to honour this ongoing rehabilitation by editing this book, selecting a series of exciting chapters that further extend the analysis offered in this introduction and expand understandings about darkness and its meanings, uses and qualities. In contextualising the chapters, we look respectively at the hugely historically and spatially diverse ways in which people have conceived and utilised darkness, at the capacities of darkness to reconfigure sensory experience in manifold ways, at the numerous ways in which creative practitioners and artists of all kinds have deployed darkness and, finally, at how darkness has been variously utilised in design practices.

The multiple meanings and uses of darkness across time and space

In Western culture, forms of received wisdom and common sense have typically considered darkness to be laden with negative attributes. From medieval times, as Galinier et al. (2010: 820) contend, darkness has symbolised ‘pagan obscurantism - deviancy, monstrosity, diabolism’. It is hardly surprising that in a culture saturated with widespread beliefs that a host of powerful supernatural forces lurked in dark corners, the night held multifarious terrors for most people. The devil carried out his work at night, and sinister hobgoblins, ghouls, ghosts, witches, demons and dark elves could be discerned in shadows and murky shapes. These superstitious beliefs about the dark were fuelled by Christian orthodoxies which drew on biblical passages to underline absolute distinctions between a malign darkness and a godly realm of light. Most obviously, Genesis 1:2–5 describes how all was subsumed in darkness until God created light, a notion poetically rendered in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung’ (2008: 83). The light is further conceived as that condition inhabited by believers, as Ephesians 5:8 articulates: ‘you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth’. Craig Koslofsky (2011) identifies these continuing associations of darkness with witchcraft and devilry, heresy, sin and death throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the devout struggling through the temptations and terrors of ‘the long night of the soul’.

These religious conceptions were supplemented and shifted by the ideas expressed in the Enlightenment, which, as the word signifies, foregrounds light. As Bille and Sørensen (2007: 272) note, the Enlightenment marked a process through which scientists and thinkers might ‘shed light on all things’ in the pursuit of ‘truth, purity, revelation and knowledge’, embodying the ideals of ‘illumination, objectivity and wisdom’ (ibid.: 273). Such ideals bolstered Eurocentric ideas that Africa was the ‘Dark Continent’, replete with animist and idolatrous faiths, ignorance and barbarism, ‘primitive’ qualities that could be overcome by the enlightening civilising mission. The metaphor of enlightenment was also assigned to Western spaces. The Victorian notion of ‘Darkest London’ was assigned to slums alleged to house indolent, criminal and depraved inhabitants, while the upright citizens of eighteenth-century urban America imagined that ‘rakes, scavengers, and thieves made their way through the inky blackness of the streets’ (Baldwin, 2004: 751). Such narratives, as Oliver Dunnett (2015: 622) explains, are not only associated with a practical and symbolic modernisation but have ‘taken on a moralising tone, seen as an all-encompassing force for good, banishing the ignorance of darkness in modern society’. Such associations extend and persist, as Kumar and Shaw (2019) demonstrate in disclosing how illumination remains a signifier of modernity in rural India. And the negative binary associations wherein darkness is counterposed to the revelatory, sacred, moral goodness of light possess an enduring legacy. They linger in common references made to the ‘Dark Ages’, ‘dark forces’ and ‘dark tourism’; darkness remains synonymous with the malevolent, sinister and backward.

This is comprehensible in grasping the potency of darkness in medieval times. As Roger Ekirch details, alongside the imagined malign entities that were believed to populate the nights were numerous very real hazards for those who ventured out after nightfall, including piles of rubbish, ditches full of waste, excrement-laden streets and overhanging timbers. Those trying to make their passage beyond city walls suffered accidents, stumbling into ‘fallen trees, thick underbrush, steep hillsides and open trenches’ (2005: 123). Gloom permeated the spaces inside most houses, with rudimentary candles providing ‘small patches of light amid the blackness’ (ibid.: 100). Little wonder also that medieval towns typically organised a watch for guarding against fire, interlopers and unidentified nocturnal wanderers, protecting inhabitants against those who used darkness to conceal their nefarious activities.

Yet even in contemporary times in which darkness has largely been banished from the city through what Koslofsky (2011) calls ‘nocturnalisation’ and Murray Melbin (1978) terms ‘colonization’ – the expansion of social and economic activity into the night and the subsequent spread of illumination – it remains widely perceived as intrinsic to danger, though this is influenced by different subjectivities of gender, ethnicity and age, for instance. Light, by contrast, affords visibility and orientation, deterring potential wrongdoers. Though this is ambiguous, with a growing awareness that light renders potential targets visible and disarms visibility outside areas of bright illumination, darkness remains associated with the fearful and dangerous (Brands et al., 2015). As illumination was increasingly utilised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Chris Otter (2008: 66) states, darkness was conceived as a problem: ‘it allowed microbes to flourish and dust to accumulate. It made cleaning difficult, and it was inimical to health’. Moreover, urban darkness intensified anxieties about moral decay, debauchery and crime, fuelled by sensationalist media reporting. Lighting up public space allowed for the exposure and inspection of civil conduct while maintaining the reserve and distance necessary for fostering liberal subjects to make rational judgements about their own and others’ conduct.

Accordingly, an orthodoxy has prevailed wherein light has reigned in many nocturnal settings, yet, having emphasised earlier that darkness is multivalent across time and space, it is invariably mediated by cultural practices and values; we emphasise Robert Williams’s (2008: 514) contention that gloomy spaces are ‘constituted by social struggles about what should and should not happen in certain places during the dark of the night’. For despite construals of darkness as overwhelmingly negative, such notions are neither historically nor geographically universal; nor have they ever been accepted by all. There has always been a plethora of dissonant voices, those for whom gloom is a cherished quality. Michel de Certeau (1984: 96) writes of the terror of an implacable light producing an urban text without obscurities, but insists that such a transformation is never complete, as this means that urban practitioners can ceaselessly create ‘opacities and ambiguities’ and ‘spaces of darkness and trickery’.

We may gain a sense of these alternative conceptions of darkness by considering certain pre-modern nocturnal values. In ancient Greek belief, the multiple qualities of darkness were portrayed, with necromancy, Dionysian and sacrificial rituals taking place in the dark. Moreover, a deep darkness was believed to characterise the lightless conditions of the underworld in contradistinction to the variable darkness of earthly night-time (Boutsikas, 2017), while the night goddess Nyx was an ambiguous divinity, associated with death and strife, but also with dreams and love (Bronfen, 2013). Gonlin and Nowell’s (2018a) edited archaeological collection also features essays that focus on the diverse and complex nocturnal historical practices and understandings of Polynesian, Native American, Indian, South American, African and Arabian cultures, collectively refuting any overdetermined universalism with regard to darkness. In their chapter in this book, Gonlin and Nowell underscore these contentions, investigating how archaeological research can reveal how sacred and productive nocturnal practices were carried out every day in ancient cultures. Zoroastrianism (Zajonc, 1993) conveys a particular Manicheanism in foregrounding an antagonism between warring spiritual powers that plays across the world, a battle, it is mooted, that will be resolved at the arrival of a final, third age in which light will triumph over dark. In his chapter for this book, Guy Bordin shows how Inuit culture emphasised that darkness was not ontologically associated with negative values but was conversely a condition conducive to sociability, storytelling, play, rituals and festivity, qualities and understandings undermined by the advent of Christianity.

Yet though we have asserted that Christian practice and belief has tended to express dualistic understandings wherein light is divine and dark is malign, older Christian conceptions challenge this orthodoxy. For instance, Veronica Della Dora identifies the appeal of the gloomy caves sought by early ascetic Eastern Christians that served as sites of prayer and retreat. Since it was beyond the capacity of humans to understand the divine, experience it visually or express it meaningfully, for these adherents, ‘(V)isual presence conceals spiritual absence; visual absence invites divine presence’ (2011: 762). Similarly, Koslofsky (2011) draws attention to a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European mystical theology that also promoted meditation within caves in which darkness inspired piety and metaphorically encapsulated the religious struggle towards the light and the path from earthly gloom to illuminated afterlife. In these caves, darkness was valued as conducive to mystery, profundity and beauty, signifying the ineffability and inexpressibility of God. More recently, Catherine Bird (2017) endeavours to refute these conventional Christian dualisms, asserting that since God is present in all things, He is as much revealed in darkness as in light. Drawing on many scriptural and spiritual references, she especially foregrounds an extract from Psalm 139:

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light about me be night,”

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is bright as the day,

for darkness is as light with you.

She also identifies the Christian Tenebrae service in which candles are successively extinguished, the final snuffing out of the light symbolising the crucifixion, divine ascendance and resurrection. Yet other belief systems also find spiritual sustenance in the dark. In Taoist meditation, remaining in a completely lightless room for a prolonged period is conducive to lucid dreaming and enhanced spirituality.

In addition to these positive cosmological and spiritual meanings, darkness has been imbued with positive qualities for a range of subaltern and oppositional groups.

In the dark, persecuted minorities, marginal groups and the lower classes may escape domineering masters, carve out time and space outside working time and achieve ‘freedom from both labour and social scrutiny’ (Ekirch, 2005: 227). Galinier et al. refer to the Mesoamericans and Andeans who escaped the violence of Spanish imperial power by confining ‘indigenous knowledge and practices to the hidden recesses of the night’ (2010: 828), and Palmer (2000) mentions the African-American slaves who forged a collectivity in the darkness. In addition, the time after the sun sets has been regarded as a period in which revolutionary, subversive and libidinal activities may thrive. Bryan Palmer conceives darkness not only to promote states of disconsolation and alienation but also transgression, as the ‘time for daylight’s dispossessed - the deviant, the dissident, the different’ (2000: 16–17) to emerge. Recently, this is exemplified by the occupation and disruption posed to urban space by the Nuit Debout protests at the Place de la Republique in Paris, where darkness has provided an opportunity to escape day-time surveillance and create an ‘intensive timespace in which political debate, discourse and protest might be more possible’ (Shaw, 2017a: 124).

As illumination has expanded, it has been resisted by ‘the traditional inhabitants of the night: servants, apprentices and students… tavern visitors, prostitutes’ and other workers and pleasure-seekers (Koslofsky, 2011: 278), as well as by witches, bohemians, beatniks, drug dealers, revolutionaries, conspirators and heretics. Late-night settings accommodate burlesque shows and blues and jazz musicians, nurturing ideas that darkness is associated with transgressive sexualities and mystical practices. These libidinal desires are especially exemplified by the gay darkrooms that offer a space in which men may seek out anonymous sexual intimacy, yet are often subject to regulation, as Aramayona and García-Sánchez (2019) show in their discussion of tourism-led closure of gay dark rooms, low-cost clubs and ‘dark rebellious’ nocturnal scenes in Madrid, replaced by more respectable, sanitised gay-friendly cafés, ‘heritage’, art galleries and restaurants. Yet while constantly subject to surveillance and control, darkness continues to spawn opportunities ‘for trying to be someone the daytime may not let you be, a time for meeting people you should not, for doing things your parents told you not to do’ (van Liempt et al., 2015: 408). These possibilities for transgression, adventure, subversion and libidinal encounter are aligned with the cultural presentation of the dark night as imbued with a nocturnal sublime. This ‘realm of fascination and fear which inhabits the edges of our existence, crowded by shadows, plagued by uncertainty, and shrouded in intrigue’ (Sharpe, 2008: 9), as discussed later, is amply portrayed in film noir, romantic art and poetry and, more curiously, in colonialist constructions of exotic otherness, as explored in Julian Baker’s (2015) account of nineteenth-century British colonial travellers in India travelling through the night to avoid the heat of the day. Baker discusses how their phantasmagorical colonial imagination intensified orientalist associations as they encountered the nocturnal landscape, with the silhouettes of elephants and bullocks, singing Indian servants, fantastic shadows and flickering flames, all enclosed by the gloom beyond, soliciting an exotic picturesque.

While romantic visions counter overwhelmingly negative portrayals of darkness, it is critical to recognise the highly ambiguous, contradictory sentiments that darkness can provoke. This is epitomised in two accounts of teenage encounters with gloom. Samantha Wilkinson (2017) shows that darkness, rather than being apprehended as a condition of fear and danger, is positively embraced by young British drinkers of alcohol. Finding spaces outside the home at night, they appreciate darkness’s allure as offering a temporary reprieve from spatial, social and sensory norms, as well as a convivial and intimate opportunity to drink and socialise with friends in a shared affective space. Conversely, Thomas et al. (2018) contend that for other young people in a different post-industrial location, darkness stoked fear and a sense of exclusion, and signified a political neglect that undergirded negative representations of their place. They undertook a campaign to install street lighting to banish the darkness that, for them, reduced convivial nocturnal movement and restricted the forging of social connections. In his chapter in this book, Ankit Kumar underscores the multivalency of darkness, showing how it generates moments of peril, a negligent local state, freedom and conviviality in rural Bihar.

The shifting values that surround darkness according to changing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: venturing into the dark: gloomy multiplicities
• Part I Histories of the dark
• Part II Cultural practices in the dark
• Part III Sensing darkness
• Part IV Designing with darkness
• References
• Index